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Tag: Android

I love my Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime, but the keyboard is not perfect. It works better than the touchscreen on my netbook, but it’s still very unrefined. I did however manage to use it to write this post.

Mostly, the keyboard problems are the fault of Android app developers who did not anticipate a keyboard being a primary interface to their app. Here are some apps that don’t quite work how they should:

ConnectBot – Key maps for special characters !@#$%^&*() are broken. These work fine for password inputs, but once I’m logged in, they’re dead. The #1 SSH client for Android is useless for all but the most basic commands.
aGmail and Google Earth – I love using the keyboard shortcuts for these desktop apps, but they have not been ported over to their Android counterparts yet.

Voice Input – When I dock my transformer to its keyboard, I lose all ability to issue voice commands or speech to text. The virtual keyboard has a nice microphone to invoke the speech capture, but no such hardware button is part of the Asus keyboard.

None of these problems are insurmountable. Hopefully the experience of having a keyboard on a tablet will improve with some basic software updates.

I’m not alarmed by the announcement about cell phone radiation being classified as a Class 2B carcinogen. I’ve been using these techniques to minimize my exposure to radiation long before this announcement was made.

Use Bluetooth

Bluetooth headsets and speakerphones have multiple orders of of magnitude less radiation than a cell phone and allow you to keep the phone away from your body/head. It’s because their transmissions are only powerful enough to go about 30 feet instead of many miles for a Cell phone tower connection. I absolutely love my Jabra BiAural headset which works for stereo audio in addition to calls.

Unfortunately, the playback is slightly choppy on my Phiremod 5.1 CM7 Gingerbread OC’d to 975MHz. So maybe this is why it’s not a supported device. I’ll try again after updating to Phiremod Nook 6.2. UPDATE: Playback is smooth after update to Phiremod 6.2.

Why the tablets madness? I’m going to be starting an interactive children’s e-Book Application publisher called Third Chicken. Isn’t it a great name? We’ll be targeting the iPad and Android tablets It’s going to be a lot of fun. A huge thanks to Tracy De Cicco and FounderMatch for bringing together the the key players who are founding this new company. Wish us cluck!